Processing systems for various food products like vegetables, fruits, and meat products are known. When focused on meat products, the systems in the art are typically directed to producing uniform slices and cuts. In fact, the art exhibits a systematic progression to achieve greater and greater uniformity. This is true whether the system is producing a diced product, where the squareness of the final product is the desired trait, or producing a sliced product, where uniformity of thickness, size, and shape is preferred. These systems produce a final meat product that is packaged and presented to the consumer with each piece looking generally the same as the next.
An important factor in a consumer's selection is the visual appearance of the cut food product. If put off by the uniformity normally on display by mass produced meat products, consumers may instead desire “home-style” products with an appearance similar to meat cut from a home cooked turkey or ham. Meat products that are irregular in shape and size can solve this need without requiring the consumer to spend hours preparing a home cooked meat product. However, the known processing systems for producing slices of meat with irregular shapes and sizes do not provide a sufficient solution this problem.
When applied on a mass scale, manual cutting and slicing is simply not cost effective, requiring tedious processing and excessive manual labor. Accordingly, there have been other attempts at producing irregular shaped and sized slices. One method known in the art involves using molds to shape the meat in casing to give them an irregular shape. These molded slices of meat are then put through a traditional cutting or slicing system, which produces a product where consecutive slices appear different from one another, but also with a pattern of repeating shapes, uniform thickness and size. Another method uses a technique of skimming the bottom of a cooked meat product to produce slices with a roughed up appearance. A final method to produce slices with an irregular shape and size involves simply taking slices from several different sticks of meat and packaging them together. However, all of these techniques still result in slices of meat that have an overall uniform appearance and/or a lack of a cost-effective technique.
Therefore, a method and apparatus is needed to mass produce high quality slices of meat of irregular shape and size in a cost effective manner. The disclosed method and apparatus produces high quality, unique slices of meat that have irregular edges, natural meat grains, and natural color variation.